In a typical execution management system (“EMS”), multiple users to have access to a single account. This provides, for example, supervisory functions for administrators over traders and their account activity. Also, it is very common for a buy-side or hedge fund to trade with a particular broker, and for that broker to have full access to the trader's account. In a multiple broker environment, staged order volume would be exposed to all brokers that had administrative rights to the account regardless of which broker the trader intended to trade with. Also, once the trader routes flow to a broker, the administrator would be able to see with whom that trade executed. Institutional trading customers have a need to trade with multiple brokers. There are a number of reasons for this, for example, soft-dollar arrangements where order flow is used as payment for research and avoiding disclosing trading strategies to a single broker.
Institutional portfolio/fund managers use an Order Management Systems (“OMS”) to keep track of the securities they need to buy or sell on a given day. Traditionally, the decision of which broker to send all or part of an order to has been made at the OMS level. The traders who are responsible for buying or selling the securities specified by the fund manager often use a separate EMS to actually send trades to the markets. The EMS allows traders to have more fine-grained control over their executions, and they can monitor real-time financial data and trade smaller portions of large orders without impacting the market price. An EMS is traditionally associated with a particular broker.